Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Jeremy Blosser (emrys)" <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On May 07, Arwed von Merkatz [v.merkatz AT gmx.net] wrote:
> First of all: If any other spell depends on a specific version of spell
> A then spell A _must not_ allow other versions. This means that the
> current apr/apr-util spells are broken as the apache2 spell requires the
> 0.9.x versions of them. In such cases the different versions should be
> provided by seperate spells, see ffmpeg/ffmpeg-cvs for another example
> where this is required.

Why would we do it this way instead of allowing spells to depend on
specific versions of other spells?  (This is a basic enough question I
assume there's some past discussion of it that predates me by quite a bit.)

If we have multiple spells to support multiple versions it forces uses to
always look at what all is available before they cast something by the
obvious name, which does *not* promote "letting users know what to expect".

> Now for the actual versioned spell. The essential differences between
> the spells we currently have:
> - some spells default to stable version, some to cvs version
...
> What I'd like to see:
> - spell asks which version to use, always defaulting to the stable
>   version

I agree when the options are just "stable release" and "daily snapshot",
but what about spells with active stable, devel/beta, and cvs branches?  In
those cases the devel branch can at times pass the stable branch in
stability as well as features, and we don't necessarily do our users favors
by just following what can be arbitrary version schemes.

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